If you haven’t seen Futurama: The Beast With A Billion Backs, this may make no sense/mildly spoil it for you. Just a note.

So! The mission for our intrepid crew is to get delegates from two species that loathe each other to a planet called Parliament (insert your own George Clinton jokes here, kids) for a peace delegation, because they both want into the Federation, and you’ve got to play nicely to enter the federation.

Oh, and apparently everyone in the Federation is a fucking vegetarian. (No offense, vegetarians, I’m just not one of you.) What. There’s meat, apparently, but it’s all replicated. The future is a little preachy.

You’d think it’d be time for wacky lizard-alien vs. mammal-alien hijinks, right? But wait! There’s a giant purple energy cloud traveling at warp speed for some reason! TO THE SENSOR STATIONS! God knows we never see mysterious glowing objects in space on Star Trek.

Geordi and Worf are working with the sensors, and Worf gets taken down by some blue electricity. Dr. Crusher is summoned, and he gets violent, so she hyposprays his ass and takes him to sickbay. Shouldn’t a Klingon be harder to subdue than that?

Like every other mysterious thing in Star Trek, this electric thing (let’s call it the Zap) is basically contagious. Worf isn’t really given a chance to act funny before it’s passed to Crusher. She gets dazed and out of it and manages to wander onto the bridge, but not before giving her poor son false hope by listening to his enthusiastic studies on dilithium crystal theory. My notes for this episode are a block of random letters from smashing the keyboard with rage. Goddamn everything is contagious. I’d say at least this isn’t The Naked Now, but this episode is it’s own flavor of bad. At least it’s not racist?

No one seems to notice that Crusher is acting like she’s been getting into the good stuff in the sickbay supplies and is randomly on the bridge. She eventually makes it to a science station to ostensibly look up data… but no one thinks it’s weird that she’s not doing that in sickbay? Shouldn’t she have access to the computers from there? Data notices she’s actually reading up on helm control, but doesn’t say anything to, say, the captain.

MEANWHILE: Mammal-Aliens are lying in wait to pounce on Lizard-Aliens. Those wacky aliens have Tasha Yar at the end of her rope! Ha ha! [laugh track]

Zap moves into the computer and kills the engines and communications and pretty much all the control systems on the ship. Not one single person on the command crew connects the various issues with the ship with the mystery energy cloud. Who put you people in charge of a starship?!?

No! Instead they have a meeting (oh my god there are so many meetings in this episode) and someone accuses the delegates of sabotage, perhaps after being bribed by the Ferengi, at this point the least scary race in the galaxy, less scary than a planet full of fluffy kittens, but damn it, we’ll pretend that they’re terrifying and dangerous. Also at this meeting, we have Data introduced to the concept of Sherlock Holmes and consulting detectives. He knows about 19th century privateers, but he’s never heard of a detective. Ooooooookay. I think this is probably an inconclusive meeting. Or I just don’t remember the outcome, because there are like ten of them in this episode. Nothing spells excitement like bureaucracy and meetings.

We really haven’t had enough Wesley Crusher in this episode yet, I wonder where he is? Oh, that’s right, he’s in Engineering. During a crisis. What better place for a teenage boy to be, really?

Zap kills the chief engineer, which doesn’t much matter because there hasn’t been a chief engineer spanning enough episodes for anyone to care about him or her.

The Data-Sherlock thing is just about the only redeeming thing about this episode, as it pops up through the ENDLESS AND INNUMERABLE MEETINGS the crew goes through.

So, while Data is off being awesome and the Chief Engineer is off being dead, Troi continues her run so far of being completely fucking useless. “Hey, Troi, the FUCKING EMPATH, why didn’t you sense something weird was happening?” “Well, I sensed duality, but all humans have that, no big deal.” Hrrrgnnnnngh.

Continuing the crew’s stunning record this episode of serious and dedicated service to a big, expensive Starfleet vessel, Geordi tells Wesley it doesn’t matter how or why the ship started working again as long as it is actually working again. Okay, yeah, I do the same thing when I get angry at my router for having an inconsistent signal, but… it’s a router, not the vital systems of a spacecraft. (Which, I remind you, is full of women and children. This is not TOS where everyone on the ship is a member of Starfleet and has a certain expectation of risk in their line of work.) (I’m sorry I will not stop thinking it is irresponsible to have a big damn ship full of families exploring the unknown. Or escorting delegations of people who are eager to kill one another.)

Finally, the Zap takes the captain when he touches a helm control or something. Stewart is doing pretty well here with some ridiculous material and I have to say I’m impressed. And then we have to go and spoil it all by having, you guessed it, ANOTHER MEETING, wherein they discuss exactly what they need to do to take command from the Captain. This time, you see, they actually notice that someone is acting strangely (finally). I know proper channels and everything are important, but it makes me long for TOS, where Spock would have just taken Kirk down if he were endangering the crew. Maybe have McCoy ready with the hypospray full of sedatives.

But nooooo…. we have to have a psychological evaluation. Which Zap!Picard neatly turns on them by insisting that Crusher and Riker go first, and in the meantime, the ship is going to turn about and go back to the energy cloud. There’s a brief interlude where the Selay are hunting the Anticans with what look like glow necklaces. Oh yeah, there’s that whole delegate-to-the-Federation plot thing that is almost utterly unnecessary to this episode! Right!

So! Back to the energy cloud we go!

Once they get back, Yivo… er, the Zap explains via Picard that it was accidentally kidnapped as they passed by, and it was lonely in the systems of the ship. It did what it could to get back, but then it entered Picard and they fell in lurrrrrrrve. Picard and Yivo are going to beam into the energy cloud and live happily ever after, so there!

And here it falls apart for me (again), because while Picard hasn’t had a lot of time to make a strong mark as a character, I have a hard time seeing him happily abandon his crew like this, even under an alien influence. I seriously just don’t buy it.

Anyway. The captain beams out into the void and the rest of the crew just kind of hang around for an hour trying to figure out what exactly to do. Riker is juuuuuust in the verge of making them leave when Troi (finally) makes herself useful and says she can sense the captain! And he’s alone! (You can sense this, but you couldn’t tell what was wrong with Worf and Crusher? I hate you.) The captain makes like Ghostwriter and writes a P in a control console, and they realize, hey, his transporter pattern is still in the memory because he was the last one to beam out! What.

We’re almost done here, I promise. But we’ve reached another place where my notes are full of CAPSLOCKRAGE. Why? Because when the captain beams in, he has no memory of going out to the Yivo cloud. Apparently, your [many colorful and creative expletives deleted] memories are stored in your transporter pattern aaagggghhh how did this show survive its first year?

Finally, to bookend the episode (and remind us that there was a whole other plot in this episode, in case we forgot again) Yar runs in at the last minute looking harried and lets us know that one of the Antican delegates (mammal aliens) ate one of the Selay delegates! Whaaaah whaaaah waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah [sitcom laugh track]

I’m back! Sort of! I am not going to lie about regular schedules, but I have started watching DS9 and blogging about it again. Ok!

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Vortex at Memory Alpha

• The idea of Odo disguising himself as a glass that someone might actually drink out of (with their mouth) is pretty much totally gross.

• The Ferengi build their phasers in the same shape as their ships. Could it be a species-wide copout, or are Ferengi just the worst designers in the galaxy? Their clothes imply that the latter could be the case, but then again, everybody in the future dresses bad.

• I don’t remember yellow highlights on the station before - did they doll it up because they are planning to enter it in illegal space station racing?

• The constant blip-blipping of Star Trek computers would make my brain kill my ears if I had to work with them regularly.

• I had missed Miles.

• The Miradorn apparently fly the same super-advanced warship that the pirates/paleo-bandits who were after the Tox Uthat had, only these days it’s not seen as being quite as super-advanced as it was a short couple of years ago. Or: the company is reusing an expensive model. Either way.

• That Odo can get knocked out (particularly by falling rocks) is just silly. He’s basically jam.

A new arrival from the mysterious Gamma quadrant seems to be tied up with some Miradorn twins, and a fancy-pants-y egg-shaped object they apparently stole. In a backroom deal at Quark’s, this new guy (Croden), kills one of the twins before Odo arrests everyone.

So now the other twin wants to kill Croden (obviously).

Croden’s got a little story about knowing changelings in the Gamma quadrant. At first, I thought this was an early lead-in to the whole Dominion arc. I mean, the episode is young, it might still be, but based on the stories Croden is telling, I suspect that it is not.

DS9’s longer arcs are what made it memorable when it was on TV, but I never really got to follow one all the way through, so I’m pretty eager to see one started.

Miles is on hand to help plan a way to extradite Croden to his homeworld without the Miradorns simply blowing him up.

Turns out Croden’s Changelingbury Tales were just a dodge so he could get to the stasis pod where he keeps his kid. Why he keeps his daughter in a stasis pod instead of in his company is not entirely clear.

Croden never stands trial for any of his crimes, because Odo is a sentimental goofball. Instead, he’s transported to a Vulcan science ship that has no idea that Croden is a murdering thief. Oh, Star Trek! Today’s lesson is that murder is ok, as long as you’re cuddly (whether this applies to your own clone or not is a grey area that this blogger is not prepared to discuss at this time).

The above shot is the runabout and the Miradorn ship inside a gas cloud. It’s not especially important, I just think it’s pretty.

First of all, I know it’s obvious, but COME ON.

Hilarious. Star Trek is 100% subtle in trying to show the future as maybe a little more open about gender-notions, is it not? THE FUTURE: CRAZY AND DIFFERENT!

Anyway, on to the episode itself.

So there is this dude, Kosinski (thank you, Memory Alpha, without you I’d misspell many a name), a “propulsion specialist.” He’s here to tune some shit and really pimp Picard’s ride. Oh, and he’s got an assistant with some Standard Issue Star Trek face ridges and a silvery jumpsuit. Fashion of the future always seems to favor the jumpsuit! At least Wesley Crusher gets to wear something as normal as a variety of unattractive sweaters. Mr. Assistant also comes with Science Fiction Trope #708, “My name is impossible for your species to pronounce.” So he’ll be Mr. Assistant for the rest of this post, eh? Or, if you’re Wesley Crusher, you can call him “My frieeeeeeeeennnnd.”

Sensibly, if you have an empath in your crew, you might take her down to check these people out, and Riker does so. But so far Troi has had basically two reactions to characters thus far: “Augh, the pain, I’m so overwhelmed” and “I can’t sense a thing from them!” Mr. Assistant is the latter.

So Kosinski is a dick, but he has a point on some matters, mainly, “What is a child doing hanging around Engineering on a Federation starship? Seriously?” Then again, there have been younger children running around the command decks, so this ship has already show itself to be all kinds of professional.

Mr. Assistant, he sees that Wesley is special and wants to be his special friend. It’d probably all be a little less creepy with out the chiming music, but the creepiness would probably not be reduced as much as I think. He’s cool with letting Wesley sit in at his station.

Anyway, there’s something going on with algorithms and… warp… yeah, I didn’t really pay attention to that. It’s completely unsurprising when it all goes completely and horribly wrong. Plus the only one who’s actually doing the work, Mr. Assistant, is phasing in and out. Wesley is the only one who notices this, and the whole ship enters that scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey with the flashing lights and colors, and the whole ship is flung two million light years from home. How they hell they’re able to chart their position and know this is beyond me. Also, this distant galaxy is much prettier and much shinier than their own, for no good reason.

NOTE: I started writing this like three months ago, and I’m not going to watch the episode again, so this will be a… less thorough commentary.

Somehow, despite the fact that no one has ever traveled this far, they can still plot their position (HOW? How the HELL do you know how far from the Alpha Quadrant you are?) and oh noes, they are two million light years from home, which means a good 300 years’ slog back to Earth. This still does not explain in any way why this part of the galaxy is full of swirling rainbows and such. It will take 50 years to get a message to Star Fleet, and Mr. Assistant is… not doing well.

Whatshisname, Kosinski, is pleased with himself, which just makes him a giant dick. And I’m going to paste a bit from my original notes:

This is kind of an old trope, the true master masquerading as the assistant, even masquerading from the one he assists. Not a bad one, but an old one. I dunno, I just feel a little like they’re going to find Wesley’s molested corpse in a Jefferies tube.

Don’t tell me if I spelled Jefferies tube incorrectly.  I’m not nerd enough to care.

There’s some deep and basically terrible conversation between the Assistant and Wesley.  I guess Space and Time and Thought are like, connected, man.

Then we’ve got the good old “everyone starts hallucinating, which reveals things about their character or gives us glimpses into the lives of background characters” except that the hallucinations are real?  And I guess we can’t miss an opportunity to bring up Tasha Yar’s Rape Gangs.  I’m what, like four episodes in?  I get it, she’s tough and troubled.  There’s also a kind of cool Turbolift to nowhere.

The Assistant tells everyone he’s a galactic tourist, and he’s powered by thought or something.  He’s basically Tinkerbell, and to get back to their own galaxy, everyone pretty much has to clap their hands and belieeeeeeeve.  He also makes a point of telling Picard how super special Wesley is, and to take good care of him.

And then they get home, the guy disappears, and oh, they give Wesley a position on the bridge.  Christ!  Oh, whatever.  It’s a starship full of families and children, which still makes no goddamn sense to me anyway.